Said By People Who Are Dust Now

The book came out of a house clearance and cost him four pounds, mostly because of the binding.

It is a small prayer book with a cracked spine, and on the flyleaf, in brown ink, in a hand that slopes, there is a name and a date. He has looked at that name a great many times.

He uses the book. That is the thing. He is not a collector, he is a man of thirty six who has been getting up twenty minutes early for about two years now and saying the office out of a book that a stranger held every morning a hundred and thirty years ago.

Two weeks ago the twenty minutes started going wrong.

Not dramatically. He still gets up. He still opens it. But somewhere around the second page a question arrived that he has not been able to put down, and it is this.

Am I praying, or am I doing a re enactment?

Because the woman whose name is in the front is dust. Her whole parish is dust. The man who printed the book, the compositor who set the type, the bishop who authorized the wording, the congregation who said it at half past seven on a wet Tuesday in a building that is now flats. Dust, every one of them.

And he is sitting at a table in a flat in a different century saying their sentences in his own accent, and he cannot work out whether that is communion or costume.

On Thursday he closes the book at the second page and sits there with his hand flat on the cover.

He is not in a crisis. That is almost worse. He is simply a careful man who has begun to suspect that the thing he loves most is a hobby.

The psalm says who it was written for, and it is you

Put your hand back on the cover, because there is a verse in the middle of a psalm that answers your question with a directness you are not expecting, and the Holy Spirit put it there for a reader exactly like you.

The psalm is a wreck of a thing. It is a man at the end of himself, in ashes, and it comes with a heading that calls it a prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed. And then, in the middle of the ruin, without warning, this.

This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.Psalm 102:18

Stop on the middle clause. The people which shall be created.

The man writing that has not met you. You do not exist. Your century does not exist, your language does not exist, and he knows it, and he says: write this down, because there are people coming who have not been made yet, and they are going to need it.

So hear this at your table on a Thursday morning. You are not eavesdropping on somebody else's prayer. The written word states plainly that it was recorded for the generation to come, and the Holy Spirit who moved a man in ashes to write down a sentence for readers three thousand years out is the same Spirit who has you opening that book at twenty past six. You are not the tourist. You are the addressee.

Now the question about re enactment. Let us take it seriously, because it is a good question and a cheap answer would spoil it.

A re enactment is a performance of an event that is over. It is finished, and we repeat the outward shape of it, and everybody in the room knows nothing is actually happening.

But look at what your book contains. It contains the psalms, which were written to be said again. Not remembered. Said. They are the only texts in the world that come with instructions for their own re use, and they were being said by people who were already centuries downstream of the men who wrote them, and Jesus Himself said them, out loud, including from the cross.

So when you say a psalm at your table, you are not repeating an event that is over. You are doing the exact thing the text was constructed to have done to it, and the thing it was doing when the woman whose name is in the flyleaf did it, and when Jesus did it.

Hear this plainly, because it goes to the heart of the fear. You are not further from God for using an old book. Scripture is itself an old book, and the Spirit of God does not weaken as words age, and what is written stands as living now as on the morning it was set in type. The paper is a hundred and thirty years old. The word is not.

And now the thing about the dead, because that is what is really unsettling you.

They are not gone. That is not a sentimental remark, it is the plainest teaching in the New Testament: the ones who died in Christ are alive, and there is a great cloud of them, and the church has always understood itself as saying its prayers in company rather than in isolation.

So think about what is actually happening at twenty past six.

The woman with the sloping handwriting said those words in a cold building on a wet Tuesday. You say them in a flat with the heating on. She is alive and so are you, and the words are the same words, and the God they are addressed to has not moved an inch in the interval.

That is not archaeology. That is a house where people arrive in different centuries and sit down at the same table, and the Spirit who set it is the one who has been keeping your place.